[My-ci] Request for Ideas!!- MyCreativity workshop, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, March 2009

[Heur B (van) (VKS)]

Hi everyone,

 

The Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam asked me to act as a
'coordinator' for a MyCreativity workshop within their 2009 Winter Camp.
More information should be online soon, but the main goal of the Winter
Camp is to offer a space for various networks to meet face-to-face, to
discuss and to develop further plans aimed at inventing new
institutional forms immanent to the logic of networks. 

 

The rationale for the workshop, in my view, should be pragmatic: how can
we develop the MyCreativity network in such a way that its ideas will
have a lasting impact beyond the direct members of the network?

 

For this, I wrote a rather rough abstract/idea for a possible workshop
theme and I would very much appreciate your thoughts, responses and
improvements. This theme is by no means fixed - consider it my
perspective on what needs to be done and which I hope will be shared by
others on this list. So here we go:

 

Title: From Creative Industries to Cultural Economies

 

Focus:

Over the last decade, creative industries policies have been guided by
one basic assumption: creative production can be (and often is)
economically sustainable and even lucrative. Instead of criticizing this
neoliberal assumption - as many have done by now - let's take this
premise as a starting point for something potentially more radical and
ask ourselves the following questions:

-          How can we make creative networks sustainable (which includes
its economic dimension)?

-          How can we achieve this without losing sight of the
profoundly collaborative nature of networked creativity?

 

Underlying these practical questions is an acknowledgement of the
increasing marginalization of creative production in policy discourses.
Having discovered that the creative industries aren't as economically
successful as originally expected, policy makers are now more and more
focusing on supporting innovation and creativity - regardless of the
particular economic sector in which this takes place. This, however,
leaves unaddressed the question how to support culture in a sustainable
manner (also see: http://ordnungsreste.net/blog/?p=38). New critiques,
therefore, should be developed. The way forward seems to me to follow
policy makers in questioning the centrality of the creative industries
and to highlight the embeddedness of economic as well as aesthetic
action in much more complex and diverse socio-cultural lifeworlds. By
culturalizing the economy, one can counter the economization of culture.
And only by acknowledging these broader lifeworlds beyond the rhetoric
of the artist and cultural entrepreneur can we expect to develop
possible sustainable models of cultural production.

 

Comments and ideas appreciated!!

 

Best,


Bas

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://idash.org/pipermail/my-ci/attachments/20081101/3000d3a2/attachment.html